Mac Music Converting CD's to MP3's on external HD NIGHTMARE!

Day 6- trying to convert my old CD's to mp3's on an external hd (without storing files on my computer). I want my files to be organized the same way as the other music folders on the drive:

Music--> Artist--> album--> songs

Problem 1: Apple software won't stop creating folders and reorganizing my files. (I'm not confident enough to code, and prefer not to pay for alternative software so I'm looking for a lay person fix.).

-I called apple twice today. The first advisor said he's had this problem so his solution was to avoid Music. -The second advisor tried to help and we thought that we had a work around, but after my computer went to sleep and awoke, it stopped working.

Process- I insert a CD into an external disc drive, Music opens and I manually fill in the album info or Music gathers it online. I select all songs. Go to file---> convert to mp3. Under preferences, I have it set to mp3 and I have the external HD selected as to where I want the files to go.

I don't have my settings set to organize my files or to copy info onto my computer.

No matter what folder I select on my external HD, Music creates its own folders (many of which are empty). This buries my songs so that it's something like:

HD--> Music---> Automatic Music---> Music---> artist--> Album-->songs

instead of:

HD--> Music--> Artist--> album--> songs

I'm concerned that trying to manually move every album is going to mess up the path and cause errors.- some albums already can't be played and I think it's because the system overrides my path.

Problem 2: Music stalls while importing and I can't import the whole album. I try, retry. Delete the old files, double check all settings, try again.

Problem 3: If I delete the empty folders on my external HD and empty my trash unplug my cd player and external drive, quite Music and restart my computer, plug everything back in, after I insert a cd, the delete files reappear.

Idea- Maybe there's an issue with my computer's HD or the external HD?

-I double checked and all software is up to date.

-Before moving files I wanted to back up my music from my external HD, so I tried copying it to a second external HD so that if I need to reformat the original HD with 70GB of music, I won't lose it all.

But-- when I tried to copy the files, there was no progress bar or icon showing it was copying and nothing indicated that the files were copied.

I tried to eject the initial music HD so that I could test the copied files to make sure they would play.

A message said the music HD was in use and therefore I couldn't eject it.

-Music was closed and the only other thing running was google.

-I then opened activity monitor to try to see what was using the HD, but I couldn't find anything.

So now. I'm not 100% confident that my music finished copying to the second external HD, so I'm afraid to erase and reformat the first HD.

At this point do I just need to give in and forget about being able to play my music from the external drive? It seems like everyone and their cousin would be having these issues. Is this just Apple's way of encouraging us to re-purchase all of our old discs from their store?

Any ideas?

Thanks